Churches Were The Pillars Around Which State's Towns Were Built

Here's our list of Connecticut's Town Treasures. Did the most iconic spot in your town make the list?

JESSE LEAVENWORTH, leavenworth@courant.com

For many years after its founding in 1751, a whipping post stood next to the Abington Congregational Church in Pomfret.

"It was never used; no one ever suffered," Abington's current pastor, the Rev. Bruce Hedman, said, "but it was there as a symbol that the power of the state and the power of the church went hand in glove."

Connecticut was founded and apportioned around Congregational churches, a tight twining of faith and local government that has faded in memory but remains in the hard boundaries of many of the state's 169 municipalities.

As soon as they erected crude shelters and cleared land, settlers of the first three towns — Hartford, Windsor and Wethersfield — "set about organizing a way of living together under both Biblical and civil law," Ellsworth S. Grant wrote in "The Miracle of Connecticut."

Puritan transplants had practical reasons to trek into what was then a vast hardwood forest. The prospect of new crop and pasture lands, abundant fisheries and mercantile opportunities were certainly on their minds.

But the spiritual destination was primary. These English men and women sought freedom from the Anglican Church's brightly colored vestments, saints' day celebrations and other ritual remnants of the Catholic church. Above all, they wanted independence from any established church heirarchy.

"We deny," Hartford founder Thomas Hooker wrote, "that Christ hath given power of jurisdiction to one particular congregation over another."

Hooker's principles of government were more democratic than those of his Colonial counterparts in Massachusetts. In a 1638 sermon, he declared that "the foundation of authority is laid, firstly, in the free consent of the people." The people, which at the time meant only certain land-holding, male church members, should have the power to choose their own leaders and to set limits on those officials' power, Hooker believed.

These principles, which would guide not only Connecticut government but the fledgling nation as well, form the spine of the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, adopted in 1639. God is central in the document.

The preamble says that "where a people are gathered together the word of God requires that to maintain the peace and union of such a people there should be an orderly and decent government established according to God to order and dispose of the affairs of the people at all seasons as occasion shall require."

"The church was considered absolutely essential for the proper running of a society," Hedman said. "The idea of a Godless society was an inherent contradiction. It would have been chaos from their point of view."

The freedom that Connecticut's early residents strived for was not freedom of religion as we know it, but freedom from interference and the "errors" of sects such as the more liberal Quakers.

Congregationalism was Connecticut's religion, and the law required each town to support "the public worship of God" by paying an "able, learned and orthodox (Congregational)" minister or ministers. Attending day-long Sunday services was mandatory.

"When a settlement had enough taxpayers to financially support its own minister and build its own meetinghouse, it could seek from the General Assembly authorization to be an ecclesiastical society," Diana Ross McCain, head of research at the Connecticut Historical Society, wrote in an article available at http://www.connecticuthistory.org.

"Establishment as an ecclesiastical society empowered the group to manage all religious affairs within its defined geographic area," she wrote. "Similarly, incorporation by the General Assembly as a town allowed residents to manage secular affairs, such as election of local officers and representatives to the General Assembly, passing and enforcing ordinances, and levying and collecting taxes, within their boundaries."

By 1669, the state had 21 incorporated towns, each with the same boundaries as its corresponding ecclesiastical society, McCain wrote. Residents often gathered to decide civic affairs and to worship in the same meetinghouse.

As the population grew, however, people on the outskirts had trouble getting to Sunday services. Distance and physical barriers such as streams and steep hills frequently prompted far-flung residents to petition for a new ecclesiastical society.

As Norwich residents moved farther east from the Shetucket River, for example, the weekly journey to Sabbath services became downright dangerous. Residents applied for autonomy in 1686, pleading to the General Court that they "hazard their lives over the water to hear the word of God preached." The founding of Preston followed.

By 1767, McCain wrote, "Middletown had been divided into five ecclesiastical societies—two on the eastern side of the Connecticut River. By 1790 there were 203 Congregational societies in the state, which meant most people lived no more than a manageable three miles from a meetinghouse."

The hardy yoemen in Abington, members of the Pomfret Congregational Church, found that trekking up a hill to attend worship was difficult, particularly in winter. They won permission to set up their own ecclesiastical society, and in 1751 built the church that stands today as the oldest meetinghouse in the state, Hedman said.

The "Standing Order" of Congregational leaders is long gone, but Connecticut retains its Congregational roots in town autonomy, which in many communties still includes a board of selectmen, town meetings and strong doubts about the value of regionalism. The Congregational church's central role in people's lives has faded with immigration and the gradual acceptance of other faiths, but Hedman said his iconic white meetinghouse continues to serve the greater community.

Residents with no connection to the Abington church, he said, will call seeking to be married or to hold a baptism ceremony in the church. The New Jersey native, who was educated and ordained as a Presbyterian minister, said that at first, he found these requests odd.

"I would answer, 'Do you believe in God? Why are you calling my church?' " he said "But I quickly learned that it was an expectation on the part of the community that the old church on the green would fulfill these rights of passage, regardless of what they believed. The symbol outlives its meaning."